Category Archive

If you’ve ever had a big deadline coming up, maybe a big school project or an important deadline at work, maybe your teacher or your boss told you that you needed to “pull out all the stops,” to hold nothing back and put your full effort into the project. The origins of this phrase lie in the music world, particularly …

If you’ve ever tried to guess the answer to a question and not quite gotten it right, maybe you’ve heard the expression “close, but no cigar!” It’s an expression used to indicate that someone has come very close to achieving something, but didn’t quite make it. Back in the early 1920s fairs and carnivals were very popular, and many of …

If you’ve spent any time in a kitchen or watching cooking shows you’ve probably heard people use the expression “from scratch.” If someone tells you, for example, that they’re making a sauce from scratch, you understand that to mean that they’re starting from the very beginning and not using anything premade in their recipe. The origin of this expression is …

Many of us have fond memories of mom and dad tucking us in to bed at the end of the day, turning out the light and saying “sleep tight!” We understood that they were telling us to have a good sleep, but where does the expression “sleep tight” actually come from? Well, back in the 1800s instead of putting a …

If you know Lewis Carrol’s classic story “Alice in Wonderland,” you’ll be familiar with the Hatter. He’s often referred to as the Mad Hatter, and for good reason: Alice’s encounter with the Hatter involves a never-ending tea party, nonsensical poetry and impossible riddles. Carrol was likely inspired to create the Hatter by real-life people who were far less whimsical. Back …

If you’ve ever been under a lot of stress or had a lot of energy to burn, you may have heard someone tell you that you need to “blow off steam.” You probably understand that they mean you should go do something that will help you get rid of that extra energy or stress, like exercising or spending the day …